Automation is well established within the pharmaceutical discovery research departments. Over the past several years, there have been efforts to apply automation and high throughput techniques into various development labs in which automated systems have been set up to serve dedicated workflows. For example, there are a number of automated reactor systems that have been used for synthesis screening and process optimization. See, for example J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2003, 125, 4306-4317; “An Automated Approach to Process Optimization, Parameter Setting, and Robustness Testing” Organic Process R&D 2001, 5, 331-334; J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2002, 124, 15280-15285; “Automated Workstations for Parallel Synthesis” Organic Process R&D 2002, 6, 833-840; “Parallel solid-phase synthesis, screening, and encoding strategies for olefin-polymerization catalysts.” Tetrahedron 1999, 55(39), 11699-11710; “An integrated high-throughput workflow for pre-formulations: Polymorphs and salt selection studies” Pharmachem, 2003, 1(7/8); and “Application of high throughput technologies to drug substance and drug product development” Computers and Chem. Eng. 2004, 28, 943-953.
While these examples highlight that automation has been successfully applied to dedicated workflows, there is a need for more flexible automation systems. Others have proposed robotic systems having interchangeable parts, including robotic arms, reaction vessels and reaction vessel arrays. See, e.g., WO 98/40159. These systems have proven too complex to be easily customizable for application to a variety of chemical workflows.
In addition, others have produced automated weighing systems, such as the Balance Automator from Mettler Toledo, Inc. This system however performs only one function (automated sample weighing) and is not modular.